Catholic League Leader William Donahue: Muslims Are Right to Be Angry, and the Charlie Hebdo Wiseguys Kinda-Sorta Brought Their Deaths Upon Themselves

Monster.

By the way, before we get into this, please, Catholics, don't think for one second anyone sees this asshole and thinks less of you. We're not idiots. We do not think that this pink-faced fat fuck-faced fuck represents "All Catholics." We know this isn't some sort of official position in the hierarchy which you've voted on; we know this asshole is, like so many others, a lazy guy with a limited skill-set who realized that the easiest way for him to make a lot of money was to open a public advocacy firm and start living large off the donations of people whose commitment to a cause exceeds their judgment and skepticism.

Like about 90% of Washington DC.

I was shocked with I first learned about what the DC pressure groups are really all about. Just random assholes who decided they could speak for a Cause and start collecting donations for it.

Some guy told me about some organization. I'm going to change the name here to protect this guy. Let's say the organization is called "The Organization for Justice," and it was founded by a guy named Johannes, and he's pretty much the only one receiving any of that donation money.

Well, people snark, calling it "The Organization for Johannes."

Won't you donate to The Organization for Johannes today?

And I figure William Donahue is just a sex-conflicted headcase who figured out that he could make some money off being a prig and prude.

So you're not on the hook for this fool. Don't sweat it.

So here's what he said:

MUSLIMS ARE RIGHT TO BE ANGRY

January 7, 2015 by Bill Donohue

Bill Donohue comments on the killing of 12 people at the Paris office of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo:

Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction.

Those who work at this newspaper have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. For example, they have shown nuns masturbating and popes wearing condoms. They have also shown Muhammad in pornographic poses.

While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not.

Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, I am in total agreement with them.

Stephane Charbonnier, the paper's publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn't understand the role he played in his tragic death. In 2012, when asked why he insults Muslims, he said, "Muhammad isn't sacred to me." Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive. Muhammad isn’t sacred to me, either, but it would never occur to me to deliberately insult Muslims by trashing him.

Really?

Anti-Catholic artists in this country have provoked me to hold many demonstrations, but never have I counseled violence. This, however, does not empty the issue. Madison was right when he said, "Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power."

Hugh Hewitt went off on him in an interview, and noted that The Catholic League is a "money-making operation" and Donohue is "doing just fine."

He makes a type of argument I hate, though. He starts doing that How dare you insult the dead people at Charlie Hebdo with your insensitive arguments argument.

I hate this argument. It is pernicious and the enemy of truth. It is demagogic. If something is true, and the opposite claim is false, we do not honor the dead by championing the false claim and suppressing the true one.

I've heard this how dare you be so insensitive to these victims demagogic gambit from both the right (say, about dead troops in Iraq) and the left (say, about dead kids at a school shooting).

It is time to retire this vile gambit. If we are speaking about important issues, grave matters of state with actual consequences as far as policy going forward, we cannot constantly be challenging each other over the "hurt feelings" allegedly felt by a dozen or two people who are almost certainly not listening.

I would say that making policy for millions or even hundreds of millions people outweighs any hypothetical, brief emotional hurts a couple of dozen of immediately-affected people might feel, and getting to the truth requires that we view all possible arguments, and not censor some for allegedly "hurting people's feelings."

For God's sakes! The slaughter itself is justified on this "hurts people's feelings" grounds!

Donohue is wrong to make these claims because these claims are wrong, not because, coincidentally, these claims may hurt someone's feelings.

That said, William Donohue is entirely full of fucked-up sex-panic bullshit and Hugh Hewitt, despite not realizing that this hoary old stab at emotional blackmail is no longer au currant, is right.

There is a kind of stupidity that does not exist naturally in the wild, which does not arise spontaneously in men's brains, but which springs up only when people's income levels depend on such stupidity.

You see this sort of stupidity all over official Advocacy DC, especially at, say, ThinkProgress and Media Matters.

Those people aren't smart, but they're not as stupid as they sound.

They are saying those stupid things because they're being paid to say them.

Period.

There is no stupidity on the face of the earth that can compete with financially-motivated stupidity.

Donohue is an embarrassment, not because he may say some things that might hurt the feelings of dead men, but because we certainly should not justify future murders on "hurt my feelings" ground, and to speak of the damage inflicted by upsetting speech and the damage inflicted by a mass slaughter as existing on the same plane is the stupid zealotry of yet another hateful, sweaty religious maniac.

And yes: Anyone can be a religious maniac, including fools who think they actually have no god at all.

In fact, sometimes I think it is especially the allegedly godless who may become the worst religious maniacs.

Glenn Beck Makes a Weaker Form of This Argument... I wouldn't even say it's an argument, so much as the expression of a sentiment: He doesn't want his God mocked. He doesn't really make the same This Thing (Insult) Is Like This Other Thing (Terrorist Slaughter) sort of conflation of harms that Donohue does.

But he's sort of in that ballpark.

Eh, being irreligious myself, it is blessedly easy for me to say "You shouldn't sweat people mocking your god." Very easy.

Still, I should hope that most educated people understand that most other people don't worship the god they do, except in the happenstance circumstance that you happen to be part of a country's religious majority, which, as I just said, is pure happenstance, and lucky for you.

But a principled view of the matter would begin by assuming that that happenstance were not present -- that your religion was a minority one, and another religion, contrary to your own, were the majority -- and fashion what rules regarding the discussion of religion based upon that situation.

If you're not permitted to mock a religion, You have in fact been effectively coerced into offering a quasi-religious genuflection and deference to that religion.

This is what rankles many people about Islamists' demands.

It's not true this is "about free speech," not primarily. It is about that, but that's sort of the elevated, let's-talk-sweetly-in-public level of discussing this.

What this is, firstly, is about Islamists' demands that we bow and genuflect to their god and, of course, by doing so, we simultaneously bow and genuflect to them.

Like so many things in life, it's a crude power/dominance game. Kind of like the feminists and the left generally are constantly demanding that we bow and scrape to their strange gods.

See, that's crude, that's low, that's base, and that doesn't involve high principle like freedom of expression, but that is, I think, what is actually going on.

So I would just warn anyone who gets a little too insistent about demanding that other people respect their god -- would you likewise submit to demands that you respect another god, perhaps an alien and distasteful one?

Respect for a god is a two way street -- one can't expect full respect for one's god from someone who doesn't believe in that god, else that person may demand the same full respect -- and full genuflection -- to his alien god.

We are only free to not believe in someone else's alien gods to the extent we are willing to let others not believe in ours.

posted by Ace at 04:03 PM

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